See as well . . .
* Q.V. — " 'There is a game of puzzles,' he resumed, 'which is
played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find
a given word — the name of town, river, state, or empire —
any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed
surface of the chart.' " — Edgar Allan Poe
From a post of Tuesday, May 7, 2019 —
“Honored in the Breach:
Graham Bader on Absence as Memorial”
Artforum International , April 2012
| . . . .
“In the wake of a century marked by inconceivable atrocity, the use of emptiness as a commemorative trope has arguably become a standard tactic, a default style of public memory. The power of the voids at and around Ground Zero is generated by their origin in real historical circumstance rather than such purely commemorative intent: They are indices as well as icons of the losses they mark. Nowhere is the negotiation between these two possibilities–on the one hand, the co-optation of absence as tasteful mnemonic trope; on the other, absence’s disruptive potential as brute historical scar–more evident than in Berlin, a city whose history, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, can be seen as a ‘narrative of voids.’ Writing in 1997, Huyssen saw this tale culminating in Berlin’s post-wall development, defined equally by an obsessive covering-over of the city’s lacunae–above all in the elaborate commercial projects then proliferating in the miles-long stretch occupied until 1989 by the Berlin Wall–and a carefully orchestrated deployment of absence as memorial device, particularly in the ‘voids’ integrated by architect Daniel Libeskind into his addition to the Berlin Museum, now known as the Jewish Museum Berlin.” |
See also Breach in this journal, as well as Void.
* Literary background — The word “Purloined” in this journal.
"When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead . . . ."
See as well "Symmetric Generation" in this journal.
"Feed your head." — Grace Slick
The diamond from the Chi-rho page
of the Book of Kells —
The diamond at the center of Euclid's
Proposition I, according to James Joyce
(i.e., the Diamond in the Mandorla) —
“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
– Glory Road
Stephen Rachman on "The Purloined Letter"
"Poe’s tale established the modern paradigm (which, as it happens, Dashiell Hammett and John Huston followed) of the hermetically sealed fiction of cross and double-cross in which spirited antagonists pursue a prized artifact of dubious or uncertain value."
For one such artifact, the diamond rhombus formed by two equilateral triangles, see Osserman in this journal.
Some background on the artifact is given by John T. Irwin's essay "Mysteries We Reread…" reprinted in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism .
Related material—
Mathematics vulgarizer Robert Osserman died on St. Andrew's Day, 2011.
A Rhetorical Question
"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….
Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"
A Rhetorical Answer
Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"
(Title purloined from Marie-Louise von Franz.)
BCE/CE — A game with three letters … See Michener Game.
BC/AD — A game with four letters … See Eddington Game.
ABCDE — A game with five letters … See Simplex.
Meanwhile . . .
"Article electronically published on December 21, 2011"—
The phrase "pattern recognition" in a news story about the
April 13 death of Princeton neuroscientist Charles Gross,
and yesterday's post about a fanciful "purloined diamond,"
suggest a review of a less fanciful diamond.
See also earlier posts tagged Fitch
and my own, much earlier and very
different, approach to such patterns —
The date of an article by the late Charles Gross —Dec. 21, 2011 . . .
. . . suggests a review of a post from that date:
See as well this journal on Marc Hauser in a post of
August 5, 2004 — "In the beginning was… the recursion?"
Dante, Purgatorio XVI
Esce di mano a Lui, che la vagheggia
Prima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla,
Che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia, 87
L’anima semplicetta, che sa nulla,
Salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore,
Volontier torna a ciò che la trastulla. 90
Related material:
and, in this journal,
Frogs:
"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time."
— Freeman Dyson (See July 22, 2011)
A Rhetorical Question:
"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….
Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"
Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"
Related material:
"One ring to bring them all…"
— J. R. R. Tolkien, Catholic author
Today in History, July 22, by The Associated Press—
"In 1934, bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death
by federal agents outside Chicago's Biograph Theater,
where he had just seen the Clark Gable movie
'Manhattan Melodrama.'"
From a Manhattan Melodrama—
"Follow the Ring"
Piatigorsky died on Sunday, July 15. Notes in this journal from that date—
Backstory—
Euclidean square and triangle—
Galois square and triangle—
Background—
This journal on the date of Hilton Kramer's death,
The Galois Tesseract, and The Purloined Diamond.
… of background for yesterday's Log24 posts—
"Now that philosophy has become a scientific pursuit…."
leads to the following article from St. Patrick's Day—
See also this journal on St. Patrick's Day—
Doodle Dandy and The Purloined Diamond (scroll down).
The diamond shape of yesterday's noon post
is not wholly without mathematical interest …
"Every triangle is an n -replica" is true
if and only if n is a square.
The 16 subdiamonds of the above figure clearly
may be mapped by an affine transformation
to 16 subsquares of a square array.
(See the diamond lattice in Weyl's Symmetry .)
Similarly for any square n , not just 16.
There is a group of 322,560 natural transformations
that permute the centers of the 16 subsquares
in a 16-part square array. The same group may be
viewed as permuting the centers of the 16 subtriangles
in a 16-part triangular array.
(Updated March 29, 2012, to correct wording and add Weyl link.)
“The letter acts like a signifier precisely to the extent that its function in the story does not require that its meaning be revealed.”
— Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference,” an essay on a story by Poe
As for Johnson’s title,
“The Frame of Reference,”
see the window above,
Epiphany 2007, and
Church of the
Forbidden Planet.
Happy birthday,
Edgar Allan Poe.
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